ON THE BIAS: Pluralistic Ignorance
On the Bias is a series that explores our cognitive biases and how they impact our behavior change efforts.
So far, we have covered the Priming Effect, Endowed Progress Effect, and Authority Bias. All previous On the Bias posts can be viewed here.
Quiz: How well do you know your Earth-mates?
Typically, I start these posts with a personal story, but I thought it would be fun to start today’s topic with a quiz.
Get a pen and paper ready to write down your answers!
In February 2024, Peter Andre et al. conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals about climate action.
1. Take a Guess: What percentage of individuals surveyed said they would be willing to contribute 1% of their household income every month to fight global warming?
[I’ll reveal the answers in a bit, but for now – take a guess!]
2. Take a Guess: What percentage of individuals surveyed feel their national government should do more to fight global warming?
In March 2024, the Pew Research Center published a compilation of results from U.S.-based surveys about how Democrats and Republicans view climate change issues.
3. Take a Guess: What percentage of Republicans in the United States support planting a trillion trees to absorb carbon emissions?
Last one!
4. Take a Guess: What percentage of Republicans in the United States support expanding the number of solar panel farms in the U.S.?
I’m leaving spaces here so you can’t look at the answers while making your guesses.
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The correct answers are:
1. 69% of individuals are willing to contribute 1% of their household income to fight global warming. (Andre et al., 2024)
2. 89% feel their national government should do more to fight global warming. (Andre et al., 2024)
3. 87% of Republicans support planting trees to absorb carbon emissions. (Pew Research Center, 2024)
4. 70% of Republicans support expanding solar panel farms. (Pew Research Center, 2024)
How did your guesses compare to the data?
If your guesses look anything like mine, then they WAY underestimate how many people support these climate-related initiatives.
What’s happening here?
Miscalculating the majority stance on issues and assuming they are not closely aligned with our personal feelings is an example of pluralistic ignorance. This bias is closely related to social norms, yet it focuses on inaccurate perceptions of prevailing social norms, which can shape our decisions and behaviors.
ON THE BIAS:“Pluralistic ignorance describes when we believe our private views differ from the majority.” » The Decision Lab
But don’t worry; we’re not alone in experiencing this bias, especially regarding climate, conservation, and sustainability actions.
Polls from a 2022 Yale Program on Climate Change Communications study showed that 66 to 80 percent of Americans support climate change mitigation policies. Yet, most Americans (80 to 90%) believe support numbers are closer to “37 to 43 percent.”
Actual support is double what most people think – that’s a big gap!
The authors found the discrepancy between actual and perceived support so astounding that they offered a stronger phrase to describe the issue: false social reality.
“We find a form of pluralistic ignorance that we describe as a false social reality: a near universal perception of public opinion that is the opposite of true public sentiment.” » Sparkman et al., 2022
Bringing the bias home: Let’s reflect on the quiz results for this segment. Consider these questions:
- Do you believe the data?
- How has your perspective shifted, if at all, upon learning that support for climate action is higher than you thought?
- What doors open for our outreach and engagement work if we embrace the data as truth?
Personally, the data is prompting me to consider how audience activation strategies and messages could target the late majority segments instead of believing we’re still in the early stages of the adoption curve.
How this bias can help or hurt our behavior change programs
HOW IT CAN HURT
The most significant challenge of pluralistic ignorance, or “false social reality,” is that it stifles and stalls progress. It holds back our efforts to mobilize action and change in several ways.
1. It reduces the audience’s motivation to act.
Individuals are more likely to act if the desired behavior is perceived as socially safe. Since we’re a herd species, we feel more comfortable joining a growing movement than bucking the norms and striking out on our own.
When we believe that most people are not adopting sustainable behaviors, it removes the social incentive and safety net to participate in something new and different.
2. It creates a silent majority.
“For people who might want to organize around climate, misperceiving these kinds of things will give them pause because it feels like you’re up against something that’s insurmountable. So there are large, disempowering effects from underestimating just how popular these kinds of policies are.” » Gregg Sparkman
If we believe that most people do not support the idea of sustainability, we may be hesitant to share how we’re making changes in our lives. This results in us doing the work silently without making it a visible, normative behavior – which feeds back into the issue of behaviors feeling socially unacceptable.
Furthermore, silent majorities make it more difficult to achieve policy change. Policymakers love enacting regulations that are already popular among their constituents. However, when the silent majority is uncomfortable voicing their preferences, decision-makers may falsely assume that the louder groups represent everyone’s viewpoints.
3. It reduces confidence in creating change.
“Creating a sense of collective efficacy, that we can respond effectively to climate change, is all but impossible under this level of misperception.” » Cynthia McPherson Frantz
It can be exhausting to feel like you are constantly pushing a boulder up a mountain without evidence of progress. Many of us who work on conservation and sustainability projects feel this way, and it can lead to burnout and hopelessness.
But what if we ARE making progress, but pluralistic ignorance prevents us from seeing and embracing where our initiatives stand today?
We should also consider this from the audience’s perspective. If we constantly deliver messages indicating that the majority is against us (i.e., we’re pushing a boulder uphill), audiences could feel less confident in our collective ability to create change.
In summary, pluralistic ignorance is a doozy of a bias that makes shifting social norms very challenging even though the silent, desired norm is in our favor.
To overcome pluralistic ignorance, we must make the invisible more visible to highlight the true prevailing social norms (the numbers are on our side!) and make behaviors socially safer to adopt.
We can do this in the following ways:
→ Provide symbols for the desired behavior.
Voting locations hand out “I voted” stickers for this very purpose. Voting, like many sustainable practices, happens behind closed doors. But if that private action can be made more visible through wearing stickers or talking about voting on social media, it provides a more accurate picture of how many people are taking action.
I give an example of using social proof to make behaviors more visible in this post about No Mow May.
→ Leverage our authority bias and our platforms.
In the previous On The Bias post, I described the authority bias and how it can support our efforts since many of our institutions are viewed as trusted messengers.
We can leverage this trusted position to talk more about the vast majority that supports conservation and sustainability initiatives AND encourage our followers to speak up about it as well. Raising the profile of the prevailing norm helps everyone feel more confident and empowered to take action.
“The empowering truth is that every public statement counts, and the more diverse the voices, the more effective the message will be. Further, when every member of society has the chance to see “someone like them” speaking in favor of action on climate change, powerholders have a stronger mandate from which to work, and activists have a wellspring of concerned citizens from which to organize a movement.” » Cynthia McPherson Frantz
HOW IT HELPS
I could not find any positive examples in the write-ups about pluralistic ignorance. I’m beginning to wonder if articles about biases are biased about the benefits of biases!
But after reading all these articles and papers, I can think of two ways this bias could benefit our behavior change efforts.
The assumed norm is aligned with our goals.
Let’s take recycling as an example here. I believe we have established that recycling is important, and it’s likely that most individuals assume that their friends, neighbors, and family members believe this as well. However, a growing number of people have started to silently wonder if recycling works and if it’s worth the effort. Even if this skepticism continues to grow, people will likely continue recycling since it’s viewed as the accepted norm.
In this case, pluralistic ignorance prevents a sustainable behavior from getting tossed aside, and it possibly buys us time while recycling systems get improved. However, I assume this benefit is far and few between for the behaviors we’re focused on.
It activates the activists.
Activists tend to mobilize when they feel that not enough is being done on a particular issue or supporters are not making their voices heard. For example, a false assumption that most people don’t support solar panel farms could prompt climate activists to lead a movement that disrupts the status quo and brings greater attention to the topic.
The most successful activist movements target issues where a silent majority exists, as this gives more people permission to express the views they’ve been keeping to themselves. If most people currently support sustainability initiatives (albeit silently), we could see more traction as our activist counterparts emphasize the issues.
A NOTE OF CAUTION
We should be mindful of when our communication efforts may be feeding into pluralistic ignorance. If we overemphasize the opinions and data points of laggards, skeptics, and “haters,” we can feed into an existing assumption that most people are not supportive of conservation and sustainability programs.
While these types of headlines can increase clicks and open rates, they will not move us closer to achieving collective action and change.
→ Check out the full set of “On The Bias” posts here.
Here are a few more articles about the widespread support for climate action and the role of pluralistic ignorance in stalling progress.
- Andre, P., Boneva, T., Chopra, F., & Falk, A. (2024). Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action. Nature Climate Change, 14(3), 253–259. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01925-3
- Frantz, C. M. (2022). To create serious movement on climate change, we must dispel the myth of indifference. Nature Communications, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32413-x
- Lloyd, R. (2024, February 20). Climate change actions are far more popular than people in U.S. realize. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-actions-are-far-more-popular-than-people-in-u-s-realize/